Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Abbas: "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli - civilian or soldier - on our lands"

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

When Pamela Geller devised the ad above and we tried to run it in
Seattle (in response to bogus "Palestinian" ads claiming that
"Palestinians" don't have equal rights in Israel), Seattle transit
balked, saying that the statement wasn't true. We then provided proof
from statements by Mahmoud Abbas and other "Palestinians," and the ads
ran -- whereupon local news reports prominently featured a "Palestinian"
activist saying that the claim was false. But now Abbas has said it
again: a "Palestinian" state will be completely empty of Jews. Hitlerite
dreams from the "moderate" "Palestinian" "leader":

"Abbas: 'Not a
single Israeli' in future Palestinian state," from Reuters, July 30:

CAIRO - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas laid
out his vision on Monday for the final status of Israeli-Palestinian
relations ahead of peace talks due to resume in Washington for the first
time in nearly three years.

Abbas said that no Israeli settlers or border forces could remain in a
future Palestinian state and that Palestinians deem illegal all Jewish
settlement building within the land occupied in the 1967 Six Days War.

The forceful statements appeared to challenge mediator US Secretary
of State John Kerry's hopes that the terms of the talks, scheduled to
begin Monday night over dinner, be kept secret.

"In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single
Israeli - civilian or soldier - on our lands," Abbas said in a briefing
to mostly Egyptian journalists.

"An international, multinational presence like in Sinai, Lebanon and
Syria - we are with that," he said, referring to United Nations
peacekeeping operations in those places....

Taliban Resurgence in Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan

China-Japan: Feedback: A Brilliant and
well informed Reader noted that the US Coast Guard was established by
Congress as a fully military organization, although not under the
Department of Defense. Under US law it is not a paramilitary
organization, uses US naval ranks and its members are subject to the US
Uniform Code of Military Justice.

On the other hand, it is a lightly armed military organization that
is similar to lightly armed organizations in many other countries that
describe themselves as paramilitary and have law enforcement authority
over civilians. The Chinese describe their coast guard as a
"paramilitary force."

The Chinese participate in coast guard forums with the US and the
Asian states so their coast guard leaders are very well informed about
practices and tactics in non-communist states.

Pakistan: During this Watch,
Presidential elections will begin in Pakistan. Mamnoon Hussain, a
textile businessman and a close ally of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is
expected to become the next president. The opposition Pakistan People's
Party (PPP) members of parliament intend to boycott the election because
the original date of the elections was moved forward in respect of
Ramadan observances.

Comment: As noted in a prior edition, the
president of Pakistan is elected by an electoral college comprised of
the members of the national parliament and the members of the provincial
parliaments.
Pakistan no longer has a presidential system of government. That
ended after the ouster of Musharraf when Pakistan reverted to a modified
Westminster-style parliament. The president only performs the
ceremonial functions of the head of state. The head of government does
all the rest.

The PPP boycott is symbolic. The party is discredited because of its
poor record of government plus it has no candidate for the presidency
who has a chance of election. The boycott avoids a humiliating
trouncing.

Internal Security. About 150 Pakistani Taliban
gunmen and bombers attacked the central jail in Dera Ismail Khan, in
northwestern Pakistan, on Monday. The government claims only 40 Taliban
escaped, from the 5,000 prisoner population at the jail. The Taliban
claim they freed 300 Pakistani Taliban.

They killed five policemen and
prompted the Pakistan Army to send reinforcements.

Comment: This is the fourth major prison
break in an Islamic country in less than a week. The significance is
that the militant groups in three countries risked a great deal in
coordinated attacks to free veterans. All almost certainly had inside
help.

That suggests the groups highly valued the skills and knowledge of
the men in jail. It raises the prospect that insurgent groups in Iraq,
Pakistan and Libya will manifest signs of improved attack planning and
leadership in coming weeks. The timing suggests significant learning is
occurring across continents among distant and disparate militant groups.

Iraq:Update. A wave of at least 12
car bombs killed at least 60 people and wounded 200 in mostly Shia
areas of Baghdad and in other southern towns. The low level insurgency
continues.

Egypt: In the Nile River Delta city of Mansoura and
the Canal city of Ismailia, pro-Mursi marches resulted in clashes with
police. The marches were protests of excessive use of force by security
forces last Saturday. No casualties have been reported yet.

The most portentous new development is a statement by the interim
prime minister that the government has no intention to declare a state
of emergency.

Comment: The Muslim Brotherhood and its
Islamist supporters once again are showing their fundamental strength:
acting in opposition. Their strategy is to present themselves as the
victims of government abuses so as to re-generate broad popular support.
Acting as the victim in opposition is a much more familiar role than
acting as a steward of good government.

On the other hand, the interim government appears prepared to oblige
the pro-Mursi supporters by making them the victims, or targets, of a
state of emergency.

In north Sinai, two policemen and one soldiers were killed on Sunday and Monday.

Tunisia: In a defiant speech on Monday, Prime
Minister Larayedh rejected opposition demands that his government and
the constitutional assembly step down and promised on Monday to complete
the country's democratic transition with a new constitution by August
and elections in December. This followed an emergency meeting of the
Islamist-led government.

A powerful trade union also held a meeting to plot its next steps to "decide the fate of the country."

The secular opposition, emboldened by events in Egypt, is now
rejecting all concessions and reconciliation efforts by the government.
It has called for the 217-member Constituent Assembly to be dissolved.
In the last few days, 70 lawmakers have left the body. Small symbolic
demonstrations continued for a fourth day outside the hall of the
Constituent Assembly.

In Tunis, security forces sealed Bardo square, located outside the
building where the transitional Constituent Assembly meets, with barbed
wire and fencing. In the southern city of Sidi Bouzid, angry protesters
tried to storm municipal offices to stop employees from going to work,
residents said, sparking clashes with Ennahda supporters. Ennahda is the
leading party in the governing coalition.

Meanwhile, on the Algerian border, Islamic militants ambushed a
Tunisian Army patrol, killing 8 soldiers, five of whom had been
mutilated.

Comment: The most significant security
measure was the closure of Bardo Square. This is significant because it
disrupts civil normality and the exercise of the rights of assembly and
speech to protect property and maintain civil order. That behavior is
known as an incongruity and it always signifies a weak government that
has no response to the protestors except curtailment of their rights.
The government is feeling pressed.

Nigeria: Boko Haram killed 20 civilians fishing
village on Lake Chad in northeastern Nigeria. The large army operations
had limited impact. The Boko Haram terrorists evaded the Army and
continued attacks as usual.

Big Brother NSA is Watching You, But Maybe Not For Long

Last
week, the Obama Administration dodged a bullet when its last-minute
lobbying defeated an amendment that would have ended the NSA’s massive
surveillance program of American citizens. The amendment, proposed by
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) to a defense-spending bill, would have
stopped the collection of intelligence data pursuant to Section 215 of
the USA PATRIOT Act unless the targets of the investigation actually
were under investigation. Under this Administration's interpretation of
the law, it vacuums up data on virtually every electronic communication
of every person in the country, by using Section 215 far more broadly
than the law provides, or was intended to allow.

The amendment barely failed -- falling short by just a mere 12 votes
in a vote that exhibited rare bipartisan coalitions both supporting, and
opposing, the amendment. Apparently, a push by House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) in the final hours before the vote was the saving grace for the NSA surveillance program.

The surprisingly narrow vote, however, is a good sign that privacy
advocates on the Hill -- reflecting broader concerns of the American
people -- are finally giving this massive surveillance program the
scrutiny it deserves.

What Amash understands, and what establishment cronies like Pelosi
fail to understand, is that there is a changing tide of public opinion
regarding America’s national security programs. The American public no
longer is content to give Uncle Sam a blank check to do whatever he
pleases, so long as it is done to “protect us from the bad guys.”
Revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed, for the first
time in broad daylight, just how far the government has gone since 9-11
to collect all manner of private data on law-abiding civilians not under
any criminal or national security investigation. The still-unfolding
IRS scandal feeds into this concern.

Americans now appear ready to dial it back, in a big way.

Public opinion of Obama and Congress are at all-time lows, due in no
small measure to the miserable job both the Executive and Legislative
branches have done to protect the constitutional rights of citizens. In
fact, a Gallup poll from June
shows the majority of Americans oppose the federal government’s dragnet
snooping programs that collect private information about citizens not
under investigation. Even the New York Times, typically a shill for the Obama Administration, notes what it calls “rapidly shifting politics” that started on the fringes of both parties but has spread into mainstream politics.

There is, of course, pushback to stemming the government’s domestic
surveillance operations.

However, this stonewalling is coming not from
citizens, but from establishment politicians who believe the public
doesn’t know what’s best for itself. For example, New Jersey Governor
Chris Christie, Obama’s pal and a likely 2016 presidential hopeful, last
week called the “strain of libertarianism” going through both parties
“dangerous” to America’s national security and blamed Senator Rand Paul
as its primary cheerleader.

Christie is right that Paul is one of the Constitution’s biggest and
most vocal supporters in Congress, and we’re lucky to have him. But
Christie is wrong in suggesting that a “strain of libertarianism” is
infecting both parties. The support of civil liberties and the
expectation that the government follow the Rule of Law hardly is a new
concept to Republicans or Democrats. Even though it is clear that both
major parties periodically have forgotten their duty to uphold the
Constitution, Republicans, at least, have traditionally been the
watchdogs of Big Government. What Christie sees as a new trend is simply
the resurgence of constitutionalism within the GOP, and among many
independents; it is a return to conservative roots where government is
not to be trusted blindly when it comes to the privacy rights of
American citizens.

This shift against government snooping augurs poorly for political
elitists like Christie, Pelosi, and Obama -- public officials who feel
they serve the interests of the State over the interests of the People.
The American public is tired of limitless government data collection and
the systematic abuse of civil liberties in the name of “national
security.” Let us hope this trend is not just a fad or temporary strain
of privacy activism but a wholesale change in how the public views
government.

While Amash’s NSA amendment is defeated for now, Republicans should
capitalize on the growing public support for intelligence reform and
rebrand themselves as the party committed to the Constitution.
Republicans have a unique opportunity to reclaim the high ground, but
only if they tune-out the “sky is falling” squawking of the Old Guard
and begin to make earnest reforms; not only regarding the NSA and IRS,
but every federal bureaucracy.

by Erika Johnsen / Hot Air

With much ado about absolutely nothing, and accompanied by his usual and so very delightful attacks on Republicans for clearly
being motivated by nothing in this world beyond the desire to thwart
him personally, President Obama introduced a faux attempt at a “grand
bargain” in yet another speech on Tuesday
wherein he would supposedly cede corporate tax reform to Republicans in
exchange for “investments” in infrastructure and education, a raise in
the minimum wage, etcetera. (…I.e., the only ideas he seems to have
in relation to economic growth.

One wonders how we ever managed to get
along before the federal bureaucracy metastasized into its currently
huge and malignant form.) The president also accused the GOP of “passing
over long-term fiscal challenges” at the expense of the middle class —
which is weird, seeing as how the president’s speech contained nary a
mention of entitlement reform.

Odd.

Of course, the president really has no intention of lowering tax
burdens or even revenue neutrality; rather, the small reductions in
rates he’s offering would be more than offset by the lost deductions and
preferences with which he wants to do away, resulting in a net increase in revenue with which he can pay for his precious “investments.” The Republican leadership was not impressed:

“This proposal allows President Obama to support
President Obama’s position on taxes and President Obama’s position on
spending, while leaving small businesses and American families behind,”
said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. …

Plus Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell suggested the move
could suck the wind out of an effort by a bipartisan duo on Capitol Hill
to push for broad-based tax reform this year.

McConnell, on the floor said the proposal “represents a serious blow
to one of the best chances for true bipartisan action in Washington.” He
called it a “rebuke” to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus,
D-Mont., who along with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave
Camp, R-Mich., is trying to build support nationally for a massive tax
code overhaul.

“I don’t think they’ve been acting in good faith. I really don’t, in
the sense of really trying to bring both sides together,” Sen. Orrin G.
Hatch, R-Utah, said Tuesday.

“I think they’re hoping that there will be some maverick Republicans
who will ignore the basic Republican doctrines and do this with them
with all the Democrats,” the top Republican on the Senate Finance
Committee continued. “It’s clear they want a very liberal approach
toward everything, especially tax reform.” …

Anyhow, it’s really much more about creating a messaging platform
from which to stand above the fray come the all-important 2014 midterms
than any serious attempt at good-faith compromise, which is precisely
what the president wants to be able to claim he’s doing. But as the WSJ explained, Obama’s “grand bargain” was meant to be a bargain for precisely nobody… except Obama:

This isn’t a serious proposal, and he knows it. It also
isn’t bipartisan, since he is offering a compromise with appeal to the
ideological spectrum running from Elizabeth Warren to Chuck Schumer.
Perhaps these are the only Members of Congress whom Treasury Secretary
Jack Lew has in his iPhone.

The real bipartisan reform opportunity would be to get behind the
chief Senate and House tax writers, Democrat Max Baucus and Republican
Dave Camp. They’ve been holding hearings on tax reform for years, and
Mr. Baucus has even invited all Senators to send him a list of tax
provisions they’d like to retain and why.

The problem, as ever, is that Mr. Obama simply can’t get over his
ideological fixation to keep tax rates as high as possible. We say
“ideological” because his own advisers concede that a 35% rate hurts
U.S. business competitiveness.

Rep. Darrell Issa accused the Obama administration and its new
IRS chief on Tuesday of obstructing his panel's investigation into the
agency's targeting of tea party, conservative and religious groups.

If "the IRS continues to hinder the committee's investigation in any
manner, the committee will be forced to consider use of compulsory
process," the California Republican, chairman of the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee, wrote in a letter to Internal Revenue
Service Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel.

The letter, which was reported by The Washington Times and CNN, was also
signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who also sits on the
committee.

The letter, however, did not elaborate on exactly what steps Issa's
panel might take, though he noted that impeding congressional
investigators could result in prison terms of up to five years.

"Obstructing a congressional investigation is a crime," Issa and Jordan stressed in the letter.

"Despite your promise to cooperate fully with congressional
investigations, the actions of the IRS under your leadership have made
clear to the committee that the agency has no intention of complying
completely or promptly with the committee's oversight efforts," the
letter said.

"The systematic manner in which the IRS has attempted to delay,
frustrate, impede, and obstruct the committee's investigation raises
serious concerns about your commitment to full and unfettered
congressional oversight," the document said.

The Issa-Jordan letter came on the same day when another House panel,
the Ways and Means Committee, released an analysis showing that
conservative groups faced more probing questions than did liberal groups
seeking the same tax-exempt status.

Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp told the Times that conservative
groups were asked three times as many questions, and were less than half
as likely to get approval from the IRS.

Like the oversight committee, Camp said his investigators were also waiting on the IRS to turn over more information.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," he told the Times. "We have
received less than three percent of the documents responsive to the
investigation."

Meanwhile, an IRS spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge, told both the Times
and CNN that the agency was "aggressively responding to the numerous
data requests we've received from Congress.

"We are doing everything we can to fully cooperate with the committees,
and we strongly disagree with any suggestions to the contrary," Eldridge
said.

The letter claimed, for instance, that the IRS has handed over only
12,000 of the more than 64 million pages of documents initially
identified as potentially relevant to the investigation into the alleged
unfair targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

"This incredibly slow pace of production has been an unnecessary attempt
to frustrate the committee's oversight efforts," Issa and Jordan said
in the letter.

Eldridge contended, however, that "while the volume of raw data
collected ... is quite high, it is a misleading figure to use in order
to determine the volume of material the IRS will ultimately produce."

"The vast majority of it is completely unrelated to the congressional investigations," she said.

"Once the data is limited to the time period in question, and the issue
in question, we expect the final tally of produced documents will be far
lower — in the neighborhood of 460,000 documents or fewer."

Eldridge said that 70 of 1,500 or so attorneys in the IRS chief
counsel's office were currently working full time to respond to
congressional inquiries into the matter.

It is a "time- and labor-intensive review process," she said.

In addition, the Issa-Jordan letter also complained that documents
produced by the IRS "contain excessive redactions that go well beyond
those necessary to protect confidential taxpayer information."

The letter also asserted that a senior IRS official — Cindy Thomas — had
been "affirmatively prevented" from providing congressional
investigators with relevant documents in her possession.

Additionally, Issa blasted the agency for allegedly trying to "carefully
orchestrate the public release" of information contained in a 30-day
review of the matter back in June — before providing the information to
the committee.

Capitol Hill Republicans have long insisted that after President Barack
Obama was first elected, the IRS started unfairly targeting conservative
groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Democrats, however, argue the IRS improperly scrutinized groups on both
the left and right as part of a clumsy attempt to administer vague
election-related tax laws.

Op-ed: A misguided quest for a state by a people who do NOT
exist By:
Diane Sori

“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”
- Ahmed Shuqeiri, former chairman of the PLO

And so the lunacy begins…again.
As the Israeli/Palestinian 'supposed' peace talks get under way in
Washington (and we all know Netanyahu is going along with this farce
just to placate Obama because of Iran) all sides, including sadly some
misguided Israelis, are missing one key factor…there is NO such thing as
a Palestinian people, period.

And if there’s NO Palestinian people then there’s NO need for a Palestinian
homeland…that simple fact is why NO peace accords will ever be reached.

The idea of a ‘Palestinian people’ with a language, culture, and
nationality all their own, is the creation of former PLO head Yasser
Arafat. Simply, he made them up to further the PLO and NOTHING more.
His creation was embellished upon by the surrounding Arab nations and
the media after the very humiliating Arab defeat to Israel in the ’67
war.

And what today’s so-called Palestinians and their sympathizers try to
call Palestine NEVER existed as an autonomous entity because there has
NEVER been a country known as Palestine governed by Palestinians.

Today’s so-called ‘Palestinian people’ are just regular run of the mill
Arabs who speak Arabic, whose ‘so-called’ religion is islam, and whose
culture is shared by the surrounding Arab nations, and NO matter how
much they protest, there are NO genetic differences between Jordanians,
Syrians, Lebanese, and the so-called Palestinians. And anyway most Arab
nationalities… Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, etc…were invented by the
British Colonial Office in the nineteen-twenties as more recognizable
boundaries were being drawn after WW1. Before then all who lived in
those newly formed countries were just known as ‘Arabs’.

These facts make the so-called Palestinians and their wanting a
Palestinian homeland just another political and tactical tool in the
Arab…actually in the muslim…arsenal used in their ultimate goal of
trying to destroy the Jewish nation of Israel…the Jewish people…and
NOTHING more.

And while the so-called Palestinians love to bloviate that they’re the
region’s original inhabitants…inhabitants who they claim were driven out
by the Jews when Israel became the Jewish homeland in 1948, they are
actually NOTHING but descendants of the muslim conquerors who over the
centuries drove out or subjugated the region’s original inhabitants…the
Jews. And remember, what they love to call Palestine was actually part
of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century, and that before
Israeli won and occupied certain disputed areas of land in wars cast
upon them by their Arab neighbors, Gaza was owned by Egypt and the West
Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were NO so-called Palestinians
then…just as there are NONE now.
And reality is in that today’s world the Arabs control 99.9% of all
the Middle East lands…just look at a map and you’ll see the tiny sliver
of land that is Israel…a sliver that takes up maybe one-tenth of one
percent of the entire landmass. Yet even that tiny sliver is too much
for the Arabs for they want it all, and NO matter how many land
concessions the Israelis make it will never be enough for them for their
goal remains to wipe the Jewish nation of Israel off the map.

To wipe the intruding Jews…the Zionists…off the map NO matter that there
was NEVER in history a Palestinian state…NEVER a Palestinian
kingdom or Palestinian kings…NEVER a Palestinian capital…nor a Palestinian language, culture, or anything even remotely comprising a Palestinian
heritage.

NOTHING remotely that can be used as justification for a Palestinian state.

To wipe Israel off the map even though history shows there was an
Israeli kingdom going back to the days of the Old
Testament…there were Israeli kings in the kingdom of Israel…there was a
capital in the kingdom of Israel, a capital forever known as
Jerusalem…there was an Israel 2000 years before the self-proclaimed
prophet mohammad dreamt that he’s flying on a “magical horse” from Mecca
to Jerusalem…there was and is an Israeli language (Hebrew), a thriving Israeli culture, and an Israeli heritage going
back to the days of Abraham.

And Israel isn’t just the name of a state…it’s first and for all time a name
of a nation (Am Yisrael). Israel is the name of the father of the
nation (Jacob) and Israelis are his descendants. The real meaning of the
word ‘Israeli’ is someone who belongs to the nation of Israel and NOT
only “a citizen of a state called Israel”. The word ‘Israeli’
(Yisraeli…Yisraelim in plural) is mentioned in the Torah and it’s used in Hebrew even today.

NO…there is NO justification for a Palestinian state in the land known
as Israel for there is NO Palestinians to lay claim to such an
entity…there NEVER has been and there NEVER will be.

And I think the so-called Palestinians would be better served if they gave
up this misguided quest and instead tried to live by these wise words
said by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, a very wise woman indeed:

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive
them for forcing us to kill their children…We will only have peace
with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

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